Hardly back from vacation, a taz colleague with the wish to post the #tazgezwitscher (our main Twitter account) with a #Bot in the #Fediverse comes forward. He then sends the link to a call from "Digitalcourage e.V." with the title "Come with us to the Fediverse".Result is, there is now an official taz-Mastodon-Bot-Account at https://mastodon.at/@tazgezwitscher

Good for us. but is a bot account also good for the Fediverse? One thing is clear: I will continue to only maintain this account on Diaspora, welcome newcomers and answer questions about taz. I do this voluntarily on my own initiative. Should #Federation and Fediverse ever talk to each other, they would be happy to do so for both of them. A more official content management of the taz on diaspora and Mastodon than that of this account will probably never exist because of the small range. And this does not only concern the taz.

It is simply not acceptable that content providers have to decide: Federation or Fediverse? Nobody can afford both, most of them not even one of both (apart from installing bots). For most other users, too, two accounts will be too many. And then they can only do one thing: Go to where ABC has an account, or to where XYZ is. Totally crazy - The separation of Federation and Fediverse contradicts IMHO any network thought. It is no justification to say that both are special interest networks, that Mastodon is more like Twitter and Diaspora more like Facebook. You can't argue that way just because Mastodon has a limit on post length, or for whatever reason. There are more similarities than differences. - Whoever wants to oppose #facebook has to work together and network instead of reinventing the wheel again and again, competing and making sure that there are small federating #nets that don't talk to each other. It's one thing to whistle at bundling the power of the developers, another to block the communication among each other. In no time at all we are back in the days of mailbox networks and the eternal clash between Fido and Zerberus. Anyone who was there at that time would never want to experience something like this again. To split a potential userbase is now, where there is the Internet, so backward that I don't have the words. - Who says now "Friendica": Friendica is a cool egg-laying wool milk sow. Everyone who wants to use different social networks should get a Friendica account. But it has nothing to do with the clear decision to operate this account with Diaspora, which has (almost) no connection to facebook et al and in my eyes is a real alternative. - The Disapora developer Dennis Schubert has expressed a few thoughts on the technical level in a blog article: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to-rule-them-all.html - That sounds plausible. If, however, no further discussions follow, there will be no solution for these problems. And that has to be done, because the way it's going now, it's a very unsatisfactory affair. In other words, that is not going to happen.

So please, please:

Talk to each other!!

PS: If you have a Mastodon account, please post it there, I would be happy.PPS: Sorry, writing this in english would have blown my time budget.